Comment by jillesvangurp

Agentic coding favors senior generalists with a broad experience in many things rather than narrow experience in one or two things. I no longer think of myself as a backed engineer. That's what I was. I can do it all now. I've been building products and doing CTO jobs for a few decades now. I'm not a specialist in all layers of the software but I know enough about all layers of the stack to be able to do things with an agentic coding tool.

It helps if you can think at the system level and understand how everything is fitting together, why certain things are better than others, etc. Domain knowledge in multiple domains helps for that. That's what it means to be a generalist. And that includes having the prior experience with having built different types of software. Understanding architectural patterns. Being aware of pros/cons of different solutions. Etc. You don't have to be a specialist in any of this. But you do need to understand things at a high level.

Being a generalist equips you to enter new domains quickly. I've done lots of consulting on search projects in the past two decades. Every project is different. But the technology stays the same. I've built search engines for dating websites, maps, addresses, material scientists, art work, etc. Every project, most of the work is figuring out what the product is about. What good search looks like in that domain. And what they are doing that is sub-optimal that needs fixing. You can't work on search ranking unless you understand that. And you only have a few days to figure it out.